Payne argues from
psychological and anthropological studies that humans are wired in such a way
that they are constantly monitoring their surroundings and interactions with
others in order to ascertain whether or not they are maintaining their status
level. He also argues that objective
indicators of status, such as wealth, educational achievement, and job title,
are often less important than subjective feelings of status as experienced by
each individual. Rather, presumed status seems to
depend on how we compare ourselves to those we choose as peers.

Payne asks us to consider levels of status as rungs on a
ladder.

“It is true that, on average,
people with higher incomes, more education, and more prestigious jobs do rate
themselves higher on the ladder. But the
effect is relatively small. In a sample
of, say, a thousand people, some will rate themselves at the top, others will
rate themselves at the bottom, and many will be in between. But only about 20 percent of their
self-evaluation is based on income, education, and job status.”

Poor persons can feel comfortable with their status if
their peers, to whom they compare themselves, are in similar situations. On the other hand, a mere millionaire who
lives in a world of multimillionaires can experience the stress normally
associated with poverty. That is an
important concept to grasp.

“….inequality is not the same
thing as poverty, although it can feel an awful lot like it….Inequality makes
people feel poor and act poor, even when they’re not. Inequality so mimics poverty in our minds
that the United States of America, the richest and most unequal of countries,
has a lot of features that better resemble a developing nation than a
superpower.”

The health and longevity problems that are associated
with poverty have been well documented.
What Payne is saying is that the same problems arise for people who are
not objectively poor, but who merely feel poor because they suffer a
status deficit. Inequality then includes
not only those who are of low income and are objectively poor, but those who
have sufficient income to not be considered poor yet feel poor.

“We have to take subjective
perceptions of status seriously, because they reveal so much about people’s
fates. If you place yourself on a lower
rung, then you are more likely in the coming years to suffer from depression,
anxiety, and chronic pain. The lower the
rung you select, the more probable it is that you will make bad decisions and
underperform at work. The lower the rung
you select, the more likely you are to believe in the supernatural and in
conspiracy theories. The lower the rung
you select, the more prone you are to weight issues, diabetes, and heart
problems. The lower the rung you select,
the fewer years you have left to live.”

“Let me be clear that I am not
simply asserting that, if you are poor, then all of these things are more
likely to happen to you. I am stating,
rather, that these things are more likely to happen to you if you feel
poor, regardless of your actual income.”

In previous articles we discussed Payne’s conclusions on
how inequality affects health and longevity and how it increases tendencies to believe in conspiracy theories and to be religious. Here, the subject will be Payne’s observation
that inequality and political polarization appear to be related.

Payne presents some rather compelling indications that
the nation’s politics have become more polarized over the years and that
inequality has something to do with it.
There are numerous studies that have been made of the degree to which
members of one party are likely to vote with members of the other party on the
various policy issues that arise. All
such investigations arrive at the same conclusion: bipartisan voting has become
very rare. A plot of one measure of this
polarization against the Gini index (a measure of income inequality) for the
United States provides an impressive correlation.

Payne also claims that this polarization consists of not
only disagreement on policy issues, but it is also characterized by distrust
and a lack of respect between the parties.
To support this contention he describes the results of PEW polls taken
over past decades.

“Polls from the Pew Research
Center have revealed that the percentage of ordinary Americans who have a ‘very
unfavorable’ opinion of the opposing political party has steadily grown over
the last three decades as inequality has increased. In 2014, about a third of respondents thought
members of the opposite party were not just mistaken, but were a threat to the
nation’s well-being. A third of
conservatives and a quarter of liberals said that they would be upset if a
family member married someone of the wrong party. These trends are dangerous, because when opponents
become enemies, people can justify almost anything in responding to them.”

But correlation does not prove causation. We must evaluate Payne’s reasoning in
concluding inequality as a causative factor.

He tallies a number of the ways in which liberals and
conservatives differ in thought processes and worldviews. Of particular relevance are the differences
in the way the two types view inequality within society. In short, conservatives tend to view
inequality as a necessary consequence of unwise choices made by individuals;
liberals tend to see inequality as an inevitable consequence of a socioeconomic
system with defects that should be corrected.

“The….fundamental distinction
between conservatives and liberals is their willingness to accept inequality. Again, most conservatives do not want
inequality for its own sake. Instead,
they view it as an outcome of an emphasis on individual rights, abilities, and
responsibilities. When individuals
outcompete others, the result is always some degree of inequality.”

“Liberals….see individual merit
as just one factor among many that determines success or failure in a
competitive market. They tend to
consider the economic system as a whole rather than just the individual players
within it, which means taking into account such factors as monopolies, old-boy
networks, institutional racism and sexism, and cycles of advantage and
disadvantage that shape people’s outcomes for reasons that have nothing to do
with individual virtues.”

Liberal and conservative tendencies
are not totally innate and immutable characteristics. Most people can and do change their outlooks
as conditions change. In particular,
threats to social order seem especially powerful in moving people to the right
politically.

“In
study after study, subjects who see the world as a threatening and dangerous
place tend to be more politically conservative.
Those who see the world as safe, and are motivated by exploring and
trying new experiences, tend to support more liberal views.”

Payne resorts to additional
psychological studies to arise at a connection between increasing inequality
and political polarization. He begins
with this observation.

“The
fact is that the higher a person’s income is, the more likely he is to vote
Republican. The richest third of the
population votes more Republican than the middle third, who vote more
Republican than the bottom third.”

This suggests that wealth and
the status that comes with it prompts a conservative viewpoint. Remember that one of Payne’s central tenets
is that it is the subjective feeling of status that is more important than
objective measures of status such as wealth.

Payne and others constructed an
investment game in which participants would earn money from picking stocks in
which to invest. Information was provided
on the various stocks to give the impression of real consequences from
decisions made, but the game was rigged and some were told they performed much
better than most while others were told they performed much worse than
most. The purpose was to create subsets
of high status winners and low-status losers and evaluate how their
artificially created status affected their reasoning.

To make the game politically
relevant, a redistribution function was imposed in which the winners were taxed
a certain percentage in order to provide funds to the losers before moving on
to a replaying of the game. Participants
were also allowed to propose changes to the way the game would be played in
future rounds, including modifications in the rules for how voting on changes
would be carried out. To make the game
even more politically relevant, players were provided the opinions of others on
how the rules should be modified.

An interesting—and
troubling—effect was noted.

“As
expected, subjects judged the other player to be more incompetent, more biased,
and less rational when he disagreed with the subject than when he agreed. When we looked closer at the data, though, we
noticed an interesting detail: The perception of the other player as biased and
irrational was driven entirely by the group who were told that they did better
than their peers. Something about
feeling superior in profits made people feel superior to other players about
their opinions also.”

As Payne explains, a person
feeling high in status will believe themselves to be in command of the facts
and view lower status people with a bit of disdain.

“If I
see the world as it is and you disagree with me, then I have only a few possible
interpretations of your behavior: You might be incompetent, you might be
irrational, or you might be evil.”

Payne presents this summary of
his results and the conclusion that he draws.

“The
subjects who thought their earnings were inferior wanted to increase
redistribution….But they wanted everyone’s vote to count equally, regardless of
whether the other player agreed or disagreed with them. The subjects who thought they were superior wanted
to reduce redistribution, and they also voted to reject the votes of those who
disagreed with them. The more they saw
the other player as incompetent and irrational, the less they wanted his vote
to count.”

“This
research was the first to show that feeling superior in status magnifies our
feeling that we see reality as it is while our opponents are deluded. It supports the idea that as the top and the
bottom of the social ladder drift farther apart, our politics will become more
divisive. That is exactly what has
happened over the past several decades.”

Payne provided some interesting
insights with his study, but basing his conclusion on it seems a leap too
far. His game produced artificial
feelings of status. In politics, there
are real feelings of status at play, and our polarized situation has roughly a
50-50 split between two parties where each views the other as incompetent,
irrational, or evil. An argument based
on economic inequality alone would have a difficult time arriving at equal
populations.

Recall that Payne claimed that the standard
indicators of status such as money, educational attainment, and job status,
consisted of only about 20 percent of what determines a person’s view of his
place in the hierarchy. Consequently,
some other driver of status must be activated in order to get the polarization
we see.

Payne provides the data needed
to provide a more compelling explanation for why inequality could be
responsible for our polarized politics.
He had the disadvantage of writing his book before the Trump election
results were available and perhaps assumed a primary effect was only secondary
in importance. Payne included a chapter
on racial bias and inequality in which he concluded that race was an important
political factor and racial bias was exacerbated by economic inequality. He also presented this result based on
numerous studies: while signs of explicit bias have retreated in recent years,
implicit racial bias remains buried deep within most of our psyches.

“Having
reflected on what a fundamentally good person you are, you will conclude that
implicit bias is other people’s problem.
Although we would all like to believe ourselves to be members of the ‘not
racist’ club, we are all steeped in a culture whose history and present is
built on massive racial inequality.
Research has shown that a majority of even well-meaning people—and their
children—show signs of implicit bias when tested.”

It is difficult to view Payne’s
chart illustrating the rise of political polarization tracking increasing
economic inequality without recognizing that another powerful change was taking
place at the same time. Starting in the
1970s, the Republican Party began a transformation from one with
conservative-fiscal and moderate-social policies to one dominated by the former
slave states of the South. Those states
once provided reliably Democratic voters on issues that didn’t affect white
racial dominance, but they became disenchanted with that party when it strongly
supported civil rights for blacks. Both
Nixon and Reagan sent out messages to unhappy segregationists letting them know
that they would be welcome in the Republican Party. And so they came and drove away most
moderates.

Another significant event was
the election of Barack Obama in 2008. It
was no accident that Republicans took polarization to new levels when he took
office. And it was no coincidence that
the Tea Party arose from the Republican ranks at about the same time. Nor was it coincidental that hate groups and
armed militias—training for the day when they would have to overthrow the
government—formed in unprecedented numbers across the nation.

The Tea Party seems to
informally include the core of the Republican voters. They are neither rich nor poor, but mainly
middle class. They do not hate the rich
elite; they admire them and wish they could emulate them. They divide the world
into themselves, the “makers,” and those demanding assistance, the “takers.” The explanation for Payne’s curve likely
resides not in income inequality directly, but how diminished economic
prospects for the middle class threatened their status as privileged
whites. To see how this works we will
turn to an anthropological study of the people of Louisiana.

Arlie Russell Hochschild has produced a fascinating and
enlightening volume evaluating the differences between liberals and what might
be generalized as Tea Party conservatives in Strangers in Their Own Land:Anger and Mourning on the American Right. She is a sociology professor at the
University of California at Berkeley who was disturbed and puzzled by the
increasing political polarization within the nation. She chose Louisiana because it appeared to be
an extreme representative of the states of the South.

“In the 2012 election, in the
nation as a whole, 39 percent of the white voters voted for Barack Obama. In the South, 29 percent did. And in Louisiana, it was 14 percent—a smaller
proportion than in the south as a whole.
According to one 2011 poll, half of the Louisianans support the Tea
Party.”

She set up shop in Lake Charles, Louisiana and set about
meeting and talking to people. She would
come back a number of times to re-interview Louisianans over a period of about
five years. She was interested more in
the why of their attitudes than the what of their political
beliefs. People are driven by their
emotions. What was the emotional core
driving the Tea Party in Louisiana?

Hochschild digested what she was learning and managed to
assemble a description that captures and illustrates the perspective shared by
those she encountered in Louisiana. She
refers to it as a “deep story,” a concept that is a bit hard to describe, but
is clear once an example is provided.

“The deep story here, that of
the Tea Party, focuses on relationships between social groups within our
national borders. I constructed this
deep story to represent—in metaphorical form—the hopes, fears, pride, shame,
resentment, and anxiety in the lives of those I talked with. Then I tried it out on my Tea Party friends
to see if they thought it fit their experience.
They did.”

This is Hochschild’s deep story.

“You are patiently standing in a
long line leading up a hill, as in a pilgrimage. You are situated in the middle of this line,
along with others who are also white, older, Christian, and predominately male,
some with college degrees, some not.”

“Just over the brow of the hill
is the American Dream, the goal of everyone waiting in line. Many in the back of the line are people of
color—poor, young and old, mainly without college degrees. It’s scary to look back; there are so many
behind you, and in principle you wish them well. Still, you’ve waited a long time, worked
hard, and the line is barely moving. You
deserve to move forward a little faster.
You’re patient but weary. You
focus ahead, especially on those at the very top of the hill.”

Hochschild’s Louisianans agreed that the ordering in the
waiting line was appropriate. Whites
come first and then come blacks and other minorities. It was income inequality that was slowing the
line down, and it had the effect of narrowing the gap between whites and the
blacks following behind them. In fact,
as the “deep story” continues, blacks and women and others were beginning to
butt in line in front of them. They
suspected that someone must be providing assistance to the interlopers. Barack Obama was, of course, the prime
example of those getting ahead of them—unfairly.

“And President Obama: how did he
rise so high? The biracial son of a
low-income single mother becomes president of the most powerful country of the
world; you didn’t see that coming. And
if he’s there, what kind of a slouch does his rise make you feel like, you who
are supposed to be so much more privileged?
Or did Obama get there fairly?
How did he get into an expensive place like Columbia
University? How did Michelle Obama get
enough money to go to Princeton?
And then Harvard Law School, with a father who was a city water
plant employee? You’ve never seen
anything like it, not up close. The
federal government must have given them money.
And Michelle should feel grateful for all she has but sometimes
she seems mad. She has no right to feel
mad.”

Any attempt to help the poor and
unfortunate places their position of privilege at risk. They don’t want help and don’t expect anyone
else to get any either. Hochschild
has sympathy and affection for many of the people she has met. She describes them as friendly and
generous. However, most of their
generosity seems to be reserved for their own communities and their social
equals. Embedded in her deep story is
the notion that the poor and unfortunate should take care of themselves and not
bother them as they look towards reaching their American Dream.

“For the right today, the main
theater of conflict is neither a factory floor nor an Occupy protest. The theater of conflict—at the heart of the
deep story—is the local welfare office and the mailbox where undeserved
disability checks and SNAP stamps arrive.
Government checks for the listless and idle—this seems most unfair. If unfairness in Occupy is expressed in the
moral vocabulary of a ‘fair share’ of resources and a properly proportioned
society, unfairness in the right’s deep story is found in the language of
‘makers’ and ‘takers.’ For the left, the
flashpoint is up the class ladder (between the very top and the rest); for the
right it is down between the middle class and the poor. For the left, the flashpoint is centered in
the private sector; for the right, in the public sector.”

So income inequality produces social conflict which gets
reproduced in our political life, but the effect of inequality is not always
what one would expect. Whereas people on
the left see conflict between a tiny wealthy elite and the rest of the nation,
the right admires the elite and wishes they could join them. For the right—in today’s Republican Party—
the conflict is between the white middle class and the poor.

Hochschild’s story was developed
in the South, but the emotions and resentments she discovered there are not
limited geographically. As Payne pointed
out, racial bias was public policy in the United States for centuries. That cultural history is not overcome in a
moment. We are only about two
generations from the point when open discrimination became illegal.

Donald Trump was elected because
he was able to recognize the resentments and fears of middle class whites and
convince them that they were not forgotten; rather, he convinced them he would
now be their champion.

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About Me

Hi, my name is Rich Couch. I spent my first career as a physical scientist. Now that I am retired I have chosen to go in another direction. I have had a lifelong love of books and an urge to write. Since I am not a story teller and I am way too old to start a new career I have found an outlet in writing essays combining reviews and my opinions of books and articles on politics and current affairs. My hope is that others will find what I have produced interesting and informative--and well written.